Big Money, the Koch Brothers and Me

On the final full day of the seminar, I noticed Senator Johnson schmoozing two donors at a poolside cabana. I’d heard someone who attended these seminars describe Johnson as the Kochs’ “model legislator.” Figuring I had to make my last few moments count, I walked over and sat down nearby. It was just me, the Kochs’ model senator and the two wealthy backers he was talking to, identified by their name tags as Ned Diefenthal and Rob Ryan. Diefenthal, it turns out, is a Louisiana metal titan, and he was complaining to Johnson about the incompetence of the Republican National Committee. Johnson did not reject Diefenthal’s complaint, and he implied that the Kochs might be a viable alternative to RNC Chairman Reince Priebus—at least for the issue in question. “That’s what they’re trying to do here and that’s what Reince is trying to do,” Johnson said. But Diefenthal, whose family over the years had donated more than $280,000 to the RNC, was riled up. Priebus “keeps sending me letters asking for money. I’m not giving him any money. He doesn’t know what to do with it,” said Diefenthal, suggesting that he considered the Koch political network a better investment. By this point I was subtly trying to interrupt the conversation to introduce myself. But Diefenthal was on a rant and wasn’t leaving any gaps where I could interject. When he finally paused for a breath, I jumped in. I explained that I was a reporter—a declaration that journalistic standards required me to make before conducting an interview—and then led with a blunt question: Do big donors and outside groups like those at the seminar have too much influence in politics?

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Before I finished my question, Johnson rose from the cabana couch and stepped around me. “It’s—it’s—it’s pretty hot,” he stammered, marching toward the nearby doors to the hotel lobby, donors in tow. Ryan, a tech billionaire, started to follow, but pivoted toward me. Pointing a stubby finger in my face, he scolded, “That’s pretty rude, you know? You interrupted a private conversation,” which, of course, I had. I didn’t disagree, and apologized again.

I assumed the jig was up. Surely one of them would alert security that their sanctum had been breached. So I found the nearest Koch security guard, figuring it was better to present myself as an honorable member of the fourth estate than to be tracked down like a fugitive. I handed him my business card, explained that I was a reporter, and told him that I was hoping to talk to Rob Tappan, a Koch public relations guy I had spotted earlier. I was ushered to the head of Koch security, Larry Moorman, and the head of hotel security, Armando Limon. How had I gotten past the checkpoint at the entrance? Limon asked. I’d just driven in, I explained. “That’s surprising,” Limon said, looking down while flicking my business card with his thumb.

***

The next day, the Kochs wrapped up their April 2013 seminar without me, and donors participated in a fitting—and fittingly effective—ritual that has marked the conclusion of most of their confabs. After a closing speech about the importance of unburdening business from governmental interference, the donors were encouraged to make pledges to a pool of cash that Koch operatives distribute to a constellation of handpicked groups, many of which are represented at the seminars. While quite a number of donors make their end-of-seminar pledges privately, others stand up and announce them, giving the pledge session an auction-like feel, with donors trying to outdo one another.

After the 2012 election debacle, I expected the pledge tally to reflect some dampened enthusiasm. Only it didn’t. A source told me later that they raised $70 million. That’s 43 percent more than they raised at the conference after their first high-profile, and highly productive, big-money spending spree, in the 2010 midterm elections. Coming out of Indian Wells, they were on pace to far surpass both their 2010 midterm effort and their $400 million 2012 effort—meaning the checkbooks of political billionaires weren’t closing over one bad election.

Indian Wells was a snapshot of an extraordinary shift: the reordering of the political system by an elite fraternity of the superrich and a small brain trust of consultants who cater to them. Starting in 2010, a few dozen of the wealthiest donors turned on a gusher of mega-checks that have made them more important than the thousands of grassroots activists, small individual donors and even party leaders put together. Together, these donors have injected into campaigns sums that were once unimaginable, even as recently as the 2008 presidential election.

Intentionally or not, this new system has eroded the power of the official parties that have rigidly controlled modern politics for decades by doling out or withholding pork-barrel spending earmarks and campaign cash. Suddenly, party leaders have none of the former to offer (the result of symbolic belt-tightening reforms), and far less of the latter than big donors operating outside the party system. The result—the one Obama lamented on that rainy day in Washington state—is the privatization of a system that we’d always thought of as public. It amounts to the takeover—hostile or not—of American politics by the ultra-rich.